SMSQmulator and Raspberry Pi 2

[Derek_Stewart]

how about porting SMSQ/E to ARM?

[Peter]

Benchmarks are such fickle tests they have to be taken with a ounce of salt.

More than just a grain here. You "benchmark" the Q68 in a mode, of which the manual explicitely says that it is not recommended when speed is relevant.
All you "measure" here is the massively reduced CPU speed caused by unsuitable operation.

Probably I should have disabled DISP_MODE 3, 5 and 7 altogether for Q68 and QIMSI.
I hoped they would be a nice add-on to view a picture once in a while, or other not speed-critical use.
But people keep benchmarking the Q68 in those unsuitable modes.

By the way, the Qzero (while also not competing in the RPi5 or PC league) no longer suffers from CPU speed reduction in those memory intensive video modes.

[pjw]

I do the benchmarks in the modes I myself use. So for me the speed is relevant only as far as it pertains to those modes.

I have no personal interest in QL modes 0 and 8 anymore as I only use those modes occasionally for testing software. I try not to write software with deliberate, unnecessary or careless limits on compatibility across platforms.

Another reason for buying a Q68 was to support and encourage development of "real" QL successors. I have no interest in undermining that endevour at the same time as supporting it! That being said, if those modes had not been available on the Q68, I would have been hard pressed to justify purchasing one.

Indifferent grades at school, we were told, were not to be seen as a put-down, but rather as an encouragement to do better!

[Peter]

Native 68K hardware is far behind anyway.
Additionally slowing it down by roughly factor 2 in public benchmarks is not very encouraging.

Q40, Q60 and Qzero are designed for unhindered usage of those video modes. Q68 and QIMSI Gold are not.
Better not list them at all, if modes with >= 1 MB video memory are used for benchmarking.

[pjw]

I think you are over dramatising this, Peter. I dont think anyone in the market for a Q68 will be put off by my benchmarks.

[Derek_Stewart]

Hi,

I personally, do not look at benchmarks.

But is it fair to compare a computer running a Single Core 68000 at 40Mhz CPU to an emulator running a 68020 CPU, running on a 64 bit 8 core CPU running at 4Ghz per core.

It does make the benchmark rediculous and not relavent.

On the UK launch of the Q60, in 2002, I pinned a A0 print of benchmarks from QL Today, on the wall. With compared Hardware to emulated software, clearly not a good comparison. This caused much anguish from btge so called QL Traders. ln my defence, I wrongly assumed that everything in QL Today was correct... wrong...

I never compare a hardware system against a emulated system. Especially when the emulated system is free, except the operating system licence fee, where applicable.

Even if we had a native QL compatible system running at Giga Hertz speeds, with Gigabytes of ram, millons of colours, no speed reduction in high resolution.

There is not much software to take advantage of this enhancement.

I use a Q68 in 1024x768 Mode 4, on a 23" monitor all very nice.

[Peter]

I think you are over dramatising this, Peter. I dont think anyone in the market for a Q68 will be put off by my benchmarks.

I think the same, but the "market" is not the point. What I simply want is reasonable figures.
And slowing down a machine by about factor two is a bit much.

[Peter]

ln my defence, I wrongly assumed that everything in QL Today was correct... wrong...

As far as I know those benchmarks were correct.

[Derek_Stewart]

ln my defence, I wrongly assumed that everything in QL Today was correct... wrong...

As far as I know those benchmarks were correct.

Hi Peter,

I am glad that my assumption and the benchmark timings I had displayed, were correct depicted the Q60 as a leader in the QL World at that time. But a notable QL emulator writer, thought the benchmarks for QPC were not correct. But agreed that to compete with the Q60, a PC rnnning over 3Ghz would be required, seemly not possible in 2002. But now it is.

Now fast forward to the now, the same thing is still happening, the Q68, QIMSI Gold, are still being compared to a PC running hundreds of times faster.

Personally, I have them all, and try to use them all, including the emulators that require paid registration, which included QPC2 from 2001, okay now free, but I paid he QPC2 registration fee, to the person who was putting me done i he QL Press.

... sorry to keep bringing the past up, but it seems so relavant.

Back on topic, SMSQmulator on Raspberry PI2 is too slow, it was too slow on a PI#i3B, needs a Pi4 or better. Best to use sQLux for QDOS, on Pi0-Pi5+, it works great on my Pi-400.

The downside, it has to be compiled on the target machine, but XorA has done such a excellent job, the process is very simple.

Maybe need SMSQ/E ported to the RPi as a native application, but would need a RISC based SMSQ/E loader.

Also WINE can be loaded in an indirect way o run QPC2 on Pi4+

[XorA]

The downside, it has to be compiled on the target machine, but XorA has done such a excellent job, the process is very simple.

The GitHub page does have binaries for a lot of OSes on it. They are automatically built by the CI.

I didn't do this work, someone sent me a PR